{"id":16311,"date":"2026-05-14T09:28:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T09:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/14\/lifehack-review-old-school-heist-updated-for-the-meme-age-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T09:28:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T09:28:39","slug":"lifehack-review-old-school-heist-updated-for-the-meme-age-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/14\/lifehack-review-old-school-heist-updated-for-the-meme-age-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"LifeHack review \u2013 old-school heist updated for the meme age – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ronan Corrigan levels up a thoroughly beta-tested narrative in this efficiently executed hacker-turned-thief split-screen thriller
T<\/span>his debut feature from Irish web-and-zeitgeist-surfer Ronan Corrigan continues its producer Timur Bekmambetov\u2019s interest in fashioning entire movies out of virtual space, collaging as it does the screens of phones, laptops and PCs. Narratively, it plays like a web 2.0 update of Iain Softley\u2019s 90s cult film Hackers: a quartet of heavily vaping, tech-savvy gamers decide to take their nightly shitposting to the next level by robbing an obnoxious crypto billionaire (Charlie Creed-Miles), whose motto is \u201cI\u2019m CEO, cunt\u201d. Corrigan\u2019s secret weapon is that his plot points have already been beta-tested offline, so what we\u2019re watching is at source an old-school heist thriller with especially open coding.
Corrigan does, however, commit far more forcefully than any of his predecessors to this accelerationist digital aesthetic. He casts newish faces with the air of habitual phonecheckers; he establishes their innate restlessness and distractibility in frantically scrolling between tabs; and he pumps the leads\u2019 squabbling banter through the same headset-filter one might strap on to play Call of Duty. Though the script \u2013 co-written by the director with Hope Elliott Kemp \u2013 wisely renames a bluff podcaster as \u201cJoe Brogan\u201d, these frames-within-frames resemble the real thing: the film\u2019s meme game is strong (if that\u2019s any kind of commendation for a motion picture), and there are no Google substitutes called ridiculous things like Search Rhino or InfoBuzz.
Corrigan and co-editor Sasha Kletsov slow the tempo to establish a tender, geekily awkward romance between hackers-in-chief Kyle (Georgie Farmer) and Alex (Yasmin Finney). Only belatedly do we experience the customary limitation of these screenlife thrillers: after the initial excitement wears off, we are given an ultra-mechanical entertainment, pointing and clicking between spinning wheels. As social media enters its flop era in the wider world, this subgenre\u2019s shelf life is surely diminishing. (Corrigan\u2019s security-cam footage indicates these events unfold between 2018 and 2020: it\u2019s already a period piece.) It is efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will probably make older viewers want to unplug and retreat into an 18th-century novel.
<\/span> LifeHack is in UK cinemas from 15 May.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ronan Corrigan levels up a thoroughly beta-tested narrative in this efficiently executed hacker-turned-thief split-screen thrillerThis debut feature from Irish web-and-zeitgeist-surfer Ronan Corrigan continues its producer Timur Bekmambetov\u2019s interest in fashioning entire movies out of virtual space, collaging as it does the screens of phones, laptops and PCs. Narratively, it plays like a web 2.0 update […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16311","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}